PlayingCardForum.com - A Discourse For Playing Cards
Off Topic Chat => The Conversation Parlor => Topic started by: sprouts1115 on December 20, 2013, 02:44:21 AM
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Well here are my happy thoughts. Why don't you two sister sites kiss and make up. The Discourse and United Cardists both have things within the boards that I like. If you two get along, this could be a golden age for both of you. I think both of you should concentrate on getting creators on your forums and talk about their cards and help them before they put some wacko cards on Kickstarter or some other crowd funding place.
Words from Mike Ratledge:
What does that mean for you? I hope that it means that everything will settle down here and we can get back to having a good time, I don't really want people just here advertising, but for all intents and purposes, I'm not going to be banning people because of it. Same with people that are primarilly here to sell things in the "Buy/Sell/Trade/ISO" forum, if that's all they want to participate I'm not really good with it, but it will be tolerated unless it is totally abused. I really want people to participate in the forums, just like has been the case for a while, but I'm not going to go hacking people off at the knees for not being like-minded as me.
That being said, I'm going to go review the bans in effect right now on a case-by-case basis. Since I am not aware of some of the history of UC, if there are people I should know about - i.e. people that have been abusive or just a holy pain-in-the-arse in the past, please pass that information along to me by PM. One thing for certain: I WILL NOT TOLERATE PEOPLE HAVING "FLAME WARS" AND CUTTING OTHER USERS DOWN HERE! This is a forum for like-minded people that are magicians, cardists, and collectors to discuss things, and that's why we're here. I'm not the kind of person to go micro-managing what everyone does, but if it gets back to me or I observe that someone is being abusive in any way, I WILL show them the door...
Some things are going to change, the sponsorship will change from the current logo to "Cyberian Way LLC", which is a company that I own for business-related endeavors. I'm going to get us started on my ideas about the "Kick Back" campaign, and create a new "Everything KickStarter related" sub-forum that will have at least the threads I maintain about "Successfully Funded KS Projects" as well as the "Active KS" thread, plus a new one "The Kickstarter Hall of Shame", which we will all have a say in and nominations for that dubious honor will win the project and/or creator a sub-thread of the "Everything KS" subforum of their own for us all to P&M about the projects and the creators of them respectively. We'll have to figure out how to rank them, what's fair as far as tagging someone with the albatross associated with the Hall of Shame, etc. I want it to be something we can be proud of and let other refer to, perhaps it will warant a new website some day when it outgrows the Playing Card arena, but for now, that's all we are concened about. Once that sub-forum is created I might move certain topics to that forum, and I will expect things that are KickStarter related to be posted there as opposed to the "New Deck" forum. I realize that these two topics overlap a great deal, but segregating KS conversations into its own little world will let people that are strictly old deck collectors participate without having to wade through tons of KS-related topics.
All this having been said, I hope that the change is welcomed by all here, and I want everyone to have a good time, feel free to express your opinions and not worry about whether of not I agree. That's not the point here, if we disagree - that's part of the learning process. I'll be the first to admit when I'm wrong, and "It's happened before"! :lol:
Ideas, thoughts, bitch-outs, all welcome here (or by PM if they involve other personalities here, please).
In 2 or 3 weeks - right after we put the New Year behind us, I'm going to be looking for a couple of partners to help me pay for the funding of these forums. It's not that expensive, in fact it's under $450 per year right now, and of course that is subject to change at the whim of GoDaddy.com, but I know that right now expenses are limited to about $430/year for hosting and administration panel fees plus around $10 per year for domain name registration. That's it. Basically I would be looking for two people (or groups of people) to come in at the $110 range or a single person (or group of people) to come in around $220 to basically split the expenses. For now, I've paid up through the renewal date in mid-February for Virtual Private Server hosting, 'cpanel' access for administation and maintenance, and through September 2018 domain registration.
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The reign of terror is over! Can I get a Haleluja!
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The reign of terror is over! Can I get a Haleluja!
[golfclap time=10s]
[/golfclap]
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What happened? UC is not working for me =(
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What happened? UC is not working for me =(
Something seems to be happening on the server end. They may be updating or moving things around.
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He is probably transferring from godaddy.com to something else. Just a growing pain. I wouldn't worry about it....
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What happened? UC is not working for me =(
It's back up, there was a SQL error (you can find the explanation there).
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Well Mike, since you haven't posted about yourself in the introduce yourself thread. I'll say it here. Welcome to the Discourse. Congratulations on taking over UC. Sounds like you on your way to turning things around there. Having multiple places for people to discover and promote playing cards is only a good thing. Good luck, and hope you stick around here to.
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Question,
Has anyone else had issues with UC since the weekend?
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I saw a personal email from Mike stating that there were major issues. Not quite sure when they would be fixed or if they are resolved already
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Question,
Has anyone else had issues with UC since the weekend?
You're not alone, haven't been able to load the page for a while now. Figured there were issues on the back end again.
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Just tried it - got the Apache 2 test page.
Mike, are you out there? Give us a heads-up and let us know what's happening.
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Got another email from Mike last night and it doesn't look good. Before I go into the details I will give Mike a chance to describe the issues, but it seems some transfer of data that was supposed to occur did not and it involves Mike Ferrante somehow. The future of UC looks bleak per the email but I do not know all the details.
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That's really nasty. >:(
I hope they'll solve the issue. Don't know why but as the site kept not loading I thought of Mike F for some reason. I hope I'm wrong...
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Wish we knew when the current registered domain name went up since it's likely it was done in the same month as it will expire. I tried a whois on unitedcardists.com but it didn't give any background info like dates.
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Wow.. That's rough
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Mike R had previously talked about getting UC transferred over to his GoDaddy hosting account around about now.
If this involved gaining access to Mike F's admin control panel... well he was less than helpful during the last hosting crisis.
We could speculate further I guess - but I'd rather wait to hear from Mike R.
(IMO worst case scenario is we start over - a prospect which is brimming with potential... On a side note and probably worth it's own thread elsewhere, Lotrek has posted teasers about the UC 2014 deck...https://www.facebook.com/GrotesqueDeck (https://www.facebook.com/GrotesqueDeck))
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Looks like some small progress is being made. If you try to go to the site it gets you to an Apache server default page. That's better than getting nothing, though as someone that has setup sites I can imagine there is a huge amount of work to restore the site and setup the forum software again.
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Mike R had previously talked about getting UC transferred over to his GoDaddy hosting account around about now.
If this involved gaining access to Mike F's admin control panel... well he was less than helpful during the last hosting crisis.
We could speculate further I guess - but I'd rather wait to hear from Mike R.
(IMO worst case scenario is we start over - a prospect which is brimming with potential... On a side note and probably worth it's own thread elsewhere, Lotrek has posted teasers about the UC 2014 deck...https://www.facebook.com/GrotesqueDeck (https://www.facebook.com/GrotesqueDeck))
Yes... We have the UC annual deck, I hope we'll have the UC site too... ::)
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We're baaaack! :D
UC = phoenix.
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We're baaaack! :D
UC = phoenix.
You should note that according to Mike Ratledge, they're currently and temporarily running the site from an old backup on a server in Brazil. Anything you post there now will likely not be saved when the forum is fully restored.
As a heads up, should any UC user want to keep a topic's continuity, please feel free to post here and copy it back to there when the board is fully restored. I don't know how easy that will be, but I do want to be helpful here. No more BS rivalries. Just put up the title of the topic on UC and give it a (UC) tag at the beginning of the topic's title line.
The restoration process will likely take a little time. Mike R. needs to get in touch with Mike Ferrante about getting access to the forum in its "before the crash" state, and Mike F. just lost his father on Monday. As I'm sure you can understand, Mike R. is broaching the topic on tiptoes and wearing kid gloves out of respect for his loss.
Mike R., if you're reading this and there's some way we can help, please ask and we'll do what we can for you.
Mike F., if you're reading this, I'm certain I speak for the membership when I say that we're sorry for your loss and give you our condolences.
If you're a UC account holder and want to continue posting there, bear in mind that newer members' accounts will be missing if they joined after the backup date. Passwords may also be reset to what they previously were. Mike R. himself had to create a new account.
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Just like to echo everything Don just said. Mike and I are meeting a week today and we'll be discussing, amongst other things, how we can work cooperatively with the two sites for the benefit of all.
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Just like to echo everything Don just said. Mike and I are meeting a week today and we'll be discussing, amongst other things, how we can work cooperatively with the two sites for the benefit of all.
Thanks, guys. I had prepared for this oh, so carefully. Made a full SQL DB backup and saved it locally, now what I find out is that it doesn't seem to work for restore - always gives a compression error. Not sure, I've opened it and had no problems, I don't understand why Windows and Linux (well, CentOS) would handle it differently.
Right now we're up & running - limping along on that one backup I found amongst the rubble that resets the board to early March. I'm still waiting to hear from the former owner by phone or email.
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UC has been "Restored" to approximately December 21st for most users!!!
Some of the older topics are weirdly missing... but i think it's as good as we're going to get considering where we were. We're working to at least restart the recent "New & Custom deck" threads...
If you created a temporary account in the interim... you'll want to go back to using your old username and password again.
:D :D :D
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Is it just me or is UC down again?
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Is it just me or is UC down again?
Yes, it should be up again shortly.
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Is it just me or is UC down again?
Yes, it should be up again shortly.
Awesome, thanks!
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No, it's not you... Down again >:(
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One of our recent UC members makes yoyos. Maybe he will be inspired to design a UC yoyo...
Whoop, we're back up again. Apparently it was a temporary security problem.
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so is there anyway that UC & The Discourse would ever merge into one forum? i know that i have been a member of both forums for less than two minutes so my ideas are basically invalid.. but if you are trying to expand the horizons of playing cards as a whole, you need to create a monopoly forum. being a new user, i can say with confidence that it is very annoying 'tab' clicking between UC & Discourse when in reality, both sites post the EXACT same information. i feel guilty having to side with one website over the other because both carry traits i enjoy in forum experiences.
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Short answer is no.
It was put to a vote recently. Most of the stalwarts over there voted against the merge. There is plenty of room for both forums to coexist. They do some great stuff over at UC. And we do some great stuff here. I agree the content is pretty much the same but the personalities are different. I like both the forums but I call this one home. I read every post from both sites every day but I'm a bit mental. Just find what you dig and run with it. You're welcomed in either spot.
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Short answer is no.
It was put to a vote recently. Most of the stalwarts over there voted against the merge. There is plenty of room for both forums to coexist. They do some great stuff over at UC. And we do some great stuff here. I agree the content is pretty much the same but the personalities are different. I like both the forums but I call this one home. I read every post from both sites every day but I'm a bit mental. Just find what you dig and run with it. You're welcomed in either spot.
Actually, the long answer is that this site nearly became a monopoly. Mike Ferrante, former owner, was supposedly going to fold the site before the end of this month if it wasn't for the offer from Mike Ratledge to buy it.
Mike R. wants to make UC an ongoing concern, so we say "Good for him." There is room for more than one forum, just as there's room for more than one radio station, more than one TV station, more than one newspaper, etc. Many will like both, some will prefer one over the other, but by whatever path taken, we all find out what's worth finding out in the end. Too much homogeneity can actually be harmful - there's no urge to be the best, no competition, leaving the risk of getting lazy and not keeping things lively and interesting. We maintain warm and friendly relations with UC these days, so it's all good to us.
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@kdklown & @don
thanks for the answers guys, i definitely feel welcome in both forums. it takes a lot of passion to continually run a forum & i see no lack of it on either side. best wishes to UC & The Discourse.
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Hi Super DD
As the proprietor here, I just wanted to echo Don's comments. Mike Ratledge and I are both members of 52 Plus Joker, he's a member here and I'm a member there, and we are working towards common goals - enhancing users knowledge and understanding of collectible playing cards and promoting our great hobby. So enjoy both!
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@52plusjoker and Don:
I could not agree more. ;)